Workers' Party of North Korea

The Workers' Party of North Korea (WPNK) was a Marxist-Leninist political party that existed in North Korea from 1946 to 1949. The party consisted of ethnically-Korean Soviet citizens and Red Army soldiers, Korean communists who had fought against Japanese occupation, Korean exiles in China who had been members of the Communist Party of China, and former Korean guerrillas who had fought against the Japanese from Manchuria. The party had 366,000 members organized in around 12,000 party cells, and the party came under the leadership of former guerrilla leader Kim Il-sung. In 1947, Kim purged the domestic faction of the party, expelling 40,000-60,000 party members for being "addicted to individual heroism", opposing the establishment of the North Korean Central Bureau, and for their scattered and weak local and provincial organizations not displaying a good degree of organization. On 30 June 1949, the party merged with the Workers' Party of South Korea to form the Workers' Party of North Korea.